Thank You, J.D. Salinger

Although I have been a voracious reader since I was a young child, and although I was an English major in college, I missed out on many of the classics. I don't know quite how it happened. Perhaps I went through high school and college at a time when my teachers and professors were sick of teaching the same old books year after year, and opted for something off the normal track. For example, instead of "Great Expectations", we read "Little Dorritt".

So suffice it to say, I never HAD to read JD Salinger in school. I got the chance to read them on my own. A friend in high school handed me "The Catcher in the Rye" during summer break. Reading the book was revelatory for me. I had often felt that books could affect me, in my ways of looking at the world, in my own ways of thinking. But never before I had thought that a book could really change the world. It may have been my youth, it may have been the fact that I was reading a book that felt so grown-up, so edgy, and not doing it because someone in school told me to, but because a friend had handed me the book, saying "Joe, you've got to read this." (Is this why I work in a bookstore now? The thrill of handselling, of passing on this same feeling?)

A few years later I was visiting a friend at a college in Iowa and had nothing to do while he went to class. I decided to wait in the lobby outside his classroom, in the science building. On a table in this sterile building was a copy of "Franny and Zooey". I started reading it, and finished the book before my friend's class was over. Here it was again, that same thrill. The same language as before, the feverish way I roared through the book, the story ringing in my ears as I finished.

Honestly, I probably should re-read both of these books. But part of me wants to keep alive that initial feeling I had after reading each of them.

Thank you, J.D. Salinger, for contributing to my love of reading & of handselling!

-Joe